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Looking for a Home in the Limbo of Alaska

From the moment of his precocious debut in 1988 with “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” it was clear that Michael Chabon was an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist. The tales in “A Model World and Other Stories” and “Werewolves in Their Youth” showcased his ability to do wonderful things with words, to conjure everything from the banalities of daily life to the most bizarre of melodrama, just as “Wonder Boys” demonstrated his ability to do slapstick comedy with as much ardor and panache as more serious, emotional material.

In these earlier stories and novels, however, the author’s copious talents did not always cohere into a satisfying whole: the plots tended to be clumsy and overly contrived; the tone often lurched uncomfortably between the comic and the somber; and the language sometimes sounded as if Mr. Chabon were channeling an older writer (like Philip Roth or John Irving or Nabokov) instead of honing a voice distinctly his own.

This all changed with Mr. Chabon’s marvelous, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (2000), a big, generous book that was both an ode to the golden era of American comic books and a bravura epic that somehow managed to forge the disparate subjects of World War II, fictional superheroes, Harry Houdini and the Golem of Prague into a sad-funny-moving meditation on life and loss and the consolations of art.

Mr. Chabon’s latest novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” builds upon the achievement of “Kavalier & Clay,” creating a completely fictional world that is as persuasively detailed as his re-creation of 1940s New York in that earlier book, even as it gives the reader a gripping murder mystery and one of the most appealing detective heroes to come along since Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe.

Though the ultimate secret behind the murder that kick-starts the story involves a religious-political scheme that tips over clumsily into surreal satire, the remainder of the book is so authoritatively and minutely imagined that the reader, absorbed in the plight of Mr. Chabon’s shambling hero, really doesn’t mind.

That hero, one Meyer Landsman by name, is a homicide detective in the Federal District of Sitka, somewhere on the Alaskan panhandle. In the alternative universe that Mr. Chabon has imagined, Sitka is the temporary safe haven created for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust; in his telling, Israel collapsed in 1948, and refugees have flocked to this remote territory, creating, over the last few decades, a hermetic, self-sustaining world.

Sixty years have passed, however, and Sitka is now due to revert to American authority. The fate of its two million residents is uncertain. Many have elected to move abroad — some to “the camel lands,” some to places like Australia and Madagascar; others are waiting fatalistically in Sitka to see what will happen.

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Landsman is more of a nebbish than your average, hard-boiled detective, but true to the noir tradition, he is an unbeliever, a man shorn of faith in luck, God and human nature. His beloved sister Naomi, an ace pilot, died in a freak airplane accident. And his marriage of 15 years to another cop named Bina has recently ended. He had persuaded Bina to have an abortion after troubling test results revealed that the child she was carrying might develop grave abnormalities; the doctors said the baby might also be fine, but it was impossible to know. Landsman, a perpetual pessimist, had elected against rolling the dice.

“Men tend to cry, in Landsman’s experience,” Mr. Chabon writes, “when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along, just under their boots, lay the abyss. That is part of the policeman’s job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.”

Since the collapse of his marriage, Landsman has been living in the seedy Hotel Zamenhof, where, one night, “somebody has put a bullet in the brain of the occupant of 208, a yid who was calling himself Emanuel Lasker.” One of the few clues in the room is a chessboard with a mystifying configuration of pieces.

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Landsman’s investigation into Lasker’s death will plunge him into a re-evaluation of his own tortured familial history and his relationship with Bina, who, unexpectedly, has become his new supervisor at work. It will cause him to re-examine his feelings about police work and larger, more existential issues. And it will threaten to throw him into a spiral of suicidal despair.

Working with his half-Tlingit partner, Berko, Landsman soon discovers that Lasker is an alias for a troubled heroin addict named Mendel Shpilman, the only son of a powerful rabbi, known for his gangland ties. As a child and as a young man, Mendel was not only a chess genius, beating the best and brightest of his elders, but also a brilliant student, rumored to possess magical healing powers. There were even whispers that Mendel might be “the righteous man of this generation” — the Messiah, perhaps, arrived to redeem the world.

How did this “miracle kid” wind up a heroin addict, shot dead in a fleabag hotel? What made him disappear the day of his wedding, some two decades ago? Why has his once doting father disowned him? And why are Bina and her superiors pressing to shut down the investigation and declare Mendel’s death a cold case?

While Mr. Chabon makes the ultimate answer to these questions — which has something to do with the highest levels of the United States government, evangelical Christians and the building of the third Temple in Jerusalem — too far-fetched to be plausible, his account of Landsman’s detective work remains suspenseful and artfully done.

More important, Mr. Chabon has so thoroughly conjured the fictional world of Sitka — its history, culture, geography, its incestuous and byzantine political and sectarian divisions — that the reader comes to take its existence for granted. By the end of the book, we feel we know this chilly piece of northern real estate, where Yiddish is the language of choice, the same way we feel we have come to know Meyer Landsman — this “secular policeman” who has learned to sail “double-hulled against tragedy,” ever wary of “the hairline fissures, the little freaks of torque” that can topple a boat in the shallows.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page E1 of the New York edition with the headline: Looking For a Home In the Limbo Of Alaska. Today's Paper|Subscribe